E3 2008: Fallout 3 Progress Report

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Bethesda's Todd Howard says the game should be all ready to ship this fall.

By Charles Onyett

Following up on Bethesda's demo of Fallout 3 at Microsoft's E3 2008 press conference, the game was playable for members of the press on Tuesday when the show "floor" (just a bunch of meeting rooms) actually opened. We got a chance to sit down for a brief session, and though we didn't get to see all that much, we did manage to get a bit of a feel for how the gameplay works and a chance to ask Todd Howard, executive producer at Bethesda, a few questions.

We started out near the beginning of the game armed with only a pistol and wearing our vault clothes. The land, as you've likely seen in any of the game footage, is scarred and burned, the buildings ashen skeletons -- the result of a nuclear war that long ago forced your people into the vault in the first place. The road ahead forked, and to the right lay Megaton, the first major settlement in the game and one that's been written about several times. We decided to follow the road a little less traveled, heading into the open world.

According to Howard, the entirety of the game will be open from the beginning though enemies will be running around that won't exactly make your adventuring an easy task. As we bounded across hills of dirt and scrap metal we found an elementary school which, as one might expect in a post-apocalyptic world, wasn't populated with children. It was full of raiders.

We approached the front door and entered, at which point the game went through a loading sequence. Once inside, we found dark hallways littered with debris from decayed walls and shattered furniture. From somewhere within the complex a raider yelled something threatening, then fired at us. Coming around a corner we spotted the threat, and, from a first-person perspective, blasted a few bullets at them in real-time. The raider was pretty far away and taking cover behind a broken door, so we decided to move forward and take advantage of the game's V.A.T.S. targeting system.

Since we were playing on an Xbox 360, we hit the right bumper to bring up targeting, which overlays percentages across each of the enemy's body parts. You then select which ones you want to damage: cripple an appendage, crit for bonus damage, or simply blow up their head. The camera shifts from your first- or third-person perspective to a more dynamic view of the targeted shots you take, showing hits, misses or special effects. Howard says the team has worked to ensure this section of battle isn't distracting or boring.

"The playback part that's going to show you what you did, mainly we tried to make it as fast as possible," said Howard. "If something really great happens, you get more of a glory angle, different FOV, documentary-style cameras, the crazier the result is the cooler the camera you get is. Usually they're fast, one to three seconds, but we didn't have much trouble with the glory cameras...but we really had the most trouble when what happens when you go into V.A.T.S. and you miss, miss, miss. We want to show you that you've missed but it's boring, right? We want to make sure that was fast, so we have a lot of ability in the camera system to speed-scale how fast the enemies are moving, how fast the player is moving, how fast the world is moving, and then when you miss, we make the player animate really fast but the world doesn't."

Even though you're not in control of your character as your targeted shot animations play out, you can still get damaged by enemies, though to a lesser degree than if you were just fighting in real-time. "In an early version of the game, we thought 'oh ok, you get hit, whatever' and then we found it to be incredibly frustrating. You have no control, and you're getting wailed on. What happens now is the damage you take during those is significantly reduced, a fraction of what you usually take. So you don't really get hurt much during the playbacks even when you're getting shot."

One of our targeted shots on the raider happened to blow up her head, and we were notified that we'd leveled up. At this point the game paused and brought up a skill screen where we could assign a number of points to categories like small arms, science, sneak and explosives. After those were set up, the game let us pick a perk, which come with level and attribute requirements. We picked the always-valuable swift learner perk, which grants a bonus to experience earned.

From the raider's corpse we picked up special raider armor and a hockey mask, both of which we immediately equipped. Other raiders dropped different styles of raider armor, but all the subtypes of raider armor can be used to repair each other. This means you don't need to roll around and find painspike raider armor to keep your own set in good condition, but can use badlands and sadist types as well.